It’s important to stress that these are example questions that have not been administered as part of any SAT test. Thus, while we think they are a very good preview of the Redesigned SAT, we don’t yet know if these questions are truly representative of the character and difficulty of the questions that will appear on the new test.

As a couple of Stanford grads who started an education company, we’ve always had a thoroughgoing interest in educational technology (as well as a newfound love for the show “Silicon Valley”). It was this passion that led us to build the mindfish.com adaptive learning platform a few years back.

And, although modern information technology has a profound potential to revolutionize the educational experience, education has been one of the slowest fields to fall under the sway of the computer revolution. Entertainment, commerce, and many other fields were influenced by web technology much earlier and much more deeply. Until now…

Have a look at the New York Times article here. Only time will tell which educational technology services thrive and which fall to the wayside. But, if we had to guess, the traditional face of education will be changing rapidly in the years to come.

The SAT verbal section places a strong emphasis on vocabulary. Unless you are an avid reader and keep a dictionary on you at all times, odds are your vocabulary is not up to the SAT’s standards. In order to improve your vocabulary fast you have to commit to learning somewhere between 500 and 3500 words. In the short term, check out the mindfish video vocabulary page to start learning SAT words in a fun new video format.

5 TIPS TO MASTER THE SAT VOCABULARY

1. MAKE NOTECARDS- Notecards not only help you learn words by allowing you to use your written memory, but they also give you a way to rapidly review, sort, and reorganize hundreds/thousands of words.

2. FOCUS ON QUANTITY NOT QUALITY- Knowing 50 to a 100 words perfectly is not nearly as powerful as having a very basic understanding of a few thousand words. Focus on learning the basic quality of words and don’t worry about secondary definitions.

3. KEEP YOUR NOTECARDS ON YOU AT ALL TIMES- If you are going to successfully learn several thousand words, you have to take advantage of all the little breaks in your day. I learned vocabulary in class before the teacher showed up, in the car when my parents drove, during television commercials, and even on the bench during my baseball games (wouldn’t recommend this one unless you have an academically inclined coach). The point is that you are not going to learn enough words unless you find a way to fit it into each and every day.

4. KEEP A DICTIONARY NEARBY- You have to stop letting words slide by. Part of building a good vocabulary comes from being accountable to the words you come across in your life. Whether you see a word you don’t know on a practice SAT test, read a word you don’t know in a novel, or hear a word you don’t know on television, you have to LOOK IT UP. Make notecards for the new words you come across and as you start learning and stop ignoring you will be amazed at how these words are all around you.

5. START WITH PREFIXES, SUFFIXES, and ROOTS- Learning thousands of words can be a daunting task and there is no way to learn every possible SAT word in a short period of time. So, whether you are planning on cramming in a few hundred the week before the test or learning a few thousand over the summer, start by learning the basic building blocks of words. The best prefix/suffix/root guide I have found is in the Barron’s SAT Book .

In order to understand what SAT score you will need to get into college, you need to consider what schools you would like to apply to. Below is a list of over 300 schools and their corresponding Average SAT and ACT scores. If you don’t see the school you are interested in, make sure and go to their admissions’ website and look it up. Also, SAT and ACT scores will keep you out of a school, but they won’t get you in. Just because you have scores above a school’s average scores is no reason to assume you will get in. The quality and uniqueness of your application, including your essays, recommendations, and high school grades and activities will be the main reasons why a school decides to admit you.

As ACT scores come back, many students may be wondering what the numbers mean. For example, “if I got a 29 on the Math section, how many questions did I miss?” Here’s an ACT scoring chart from a couple of years back that should shed a bit of light on these types of questions. If you’re trying to make sense of your score, find your section score on the far left or right of this ACT Score chart. Then trace over the the section column (English, Math, Reading, Science) to determine how many questions you answered correctly on that section.